Plateau, Seoul, 7/4 – 12/8/2013
The Murakami show at Plateau Seoul has been on since the summer, however it was just in the autumn that I managed to stop by. Murakami’s work is so iconic that I did not consider it necessary to see, but after the visit I still found it worthy to see. The show was minutely set up, showing a range of works, not too large, but a variety – the flower series (both sculpture and canvas), photographic works, sculpture works, animation, as well as the recent (2011) homage to Yves Klein work.
What I enjoyed most was to contemplate the relation between his ‘superflat’ theory and the artworks on show. I see the root on Murakami’s success in the way how he was able to draw on different sources and merge it into his own artistic language. There is a very close parallel with Jeff Koons, but Murakami was able to localize Koon’s vocabulary in a Japanese context by stating a number of art historical facts which he grouped together under the ‘superflat’ term. Similar to American pop-artists he carried out search for the lowest common denominator within the sphere of contemporary Japanese culture, and then used it as a base for building up his own practice, distinguishing it from other works by infusing personalized traits (e.g. the character of Mr. DOB) or cross-references to Euroamerican art (e.g. Yves Klein). Very shallow, well, superflat, yet very well constructed, one could almost say engineered – in ideas as well as in materials.
